T-Mobile Beats Expectations for Profit and Phone Subscribers

T-Mobile US beat expectations on Wall Street with its quarterly estimates for net new additions to phone subscribers and its profit, driven in part by its wireless plans and offers for trade-ins for iPhones that were aimed at fending off larger rivals.

Shares of T-Mobile US rose by 3% in extended Tuesday trading. T-Mobile US, which is the third largest wireless carrier in the U.S. by number of subscribers, is waiting on approval from regulators for its deal to acquire Sprint Corp, its smaller rival as it attempts to gain more scale in order to compete with AT&T and Verizon the top two wireless carriers.

The company is expecting to close its merger during the first six months of 2019 and has been given approval thus far from 50% of the state commissions reviewing the agreement, said CEO John Legere.

T-Mobile added 774,000 net phone subscribers who play each month during its third quarter, which was up from last year during the same quarter when it added 595,000. It results were far ahead of expectations on Wall Street for 628,000 net subscribers.

That growth was aided by its new wireless plans that are aimed at specific users like those over the age of 55 and members of the military, which helped gain T-Mobile new client segments.

T-Mobile announced that it is now expecting to add between 3.8 million and 4.1 million net postpaid customer for its full year, which is up from previous forecasts of between 3 million and 3.6 million.

Analysts on Wall Street watch the “postpaid” subscriber figure due to those users paying a monthly bill and are more valuable to carriers.

One market research analyst said the results by T-Mobile US were strong and that the wireless carrier was gaining much needed traction in its new segments and its new geographies.

Revenue for T-Mobile rose from $10.02 billion to $10.84 billion, which beat estimates by analysts of $10.72 billion.

Its net income increased from $550 million equal to 63 cents per share during the same quarter last year to $795 million equal to 93 cents per share for the quarter ended September 30.

Net income, said T-Mobile was impacted during the three-month period by costs of $53 million related to the pending merger with Sprint.